Tunney
In this era of no-wax floors, synthetic countertops, and special gadgets that perform every conceivable kitchen chore, it may be hard for us to imagine the challenges that faced the housewife who labored in the kitchen of yesteryear. Preparing several meals was only part of her daily responsibilities. When the meal had been devoured, Mom was left with a table, stove and sink heaped with dirty pots, pans and dishes. Josephine Cochrane, who founded a company that eventually became Kitchen-Aid, invented the mechanical dishwasher in 1886. Unfortunately for most housewives, the electric dishwasher did not catch on for consumer use until the 1950s, when it became more affordable and compact. In most homes in our region, the only dishwasher in the kitchen was of the two-legged variety.
“Everyone pitched in,” recalls reader Alma Mulligan of Pecos, New Mexico. “Water was heated on the stove, and bar soap was used to wash the dishes.”
To this day, Alma and her husband Wally, who grew up on Bull Run Road, have not succumbed to the temptation to purchase an automatic dishwasher. Then again, this couple has never had much reason to buy one. They contend there is a benefit to not owning a dishwasher.
“Wally and I refuse to get a dishwasher,” Alma declared. “When our 12 kids visit, they all pitch in and have great conversations while they wash and dry. They chide us about not having a dishwasher, but I think they secretly enjoy it.”
The after-dinner dishwashing ritual that takes place in Wally and Alma’s kitchen reminds Wally of his childhood days.
“We often had boys from Hiller School stop at our house for supper,” Wally remarked, “and then my mom or dad would drive them home. After dinner, we kids, including our visiting friends, would wash the dishes, dry them, and put them away, singing all the while. To this day, our home has never had a dishwasher, and many a family problem has been solved by family members while washing and drying dishes. Now our grandchildren are involved in doing the dishes.”
“Dishes had to be done immediately at our house,” reader Rosalie Renshaw Coughenour of Hopwood informed me, “because there was only a small counter attached to our sink where the wet dishes, pots and pans could be placed after washing. Due to the limited space, some pots and pans were washed immediately after use and before the meal, which reduced the number of items to be washed after the meal.
“I became so accustomed to washing dishes by hand that when my husband and I bought a dishwasher for our home, I used it for storage of bread and pastry items for several years until I got used to not physically washing dishes.”
Reader Bob Simpson, Brownsville High School Class of ’53, recalls what life was like in the years before technology simplified those after-dinner chores.
“Dishwashers were not yet generally available for household use when I was growing up,” Bob commented, “so I was part of the ‘dish washing team.’ Natural soap was used, and sometimes the dishwater had to be changed when the soap lost its cleansing properties. When synthetic detergent was introduced, it eliminated the need to change the dishwater and was quite an improvement. It made cleaning greasy dishes a snap!”
Keeping the kitchen and the rest of the house clean was a never-ending chore in those years, when most homes were heated with coal. The residue from the area’s thousands of coke ovens was tracked into the house all day, and that dirt mingled with the airborne coal dust produced by the coal-fired stove and the coal furnace or grate. No part of the house became soiled faster than the kitchen floor.
“Linoleum was the floor of the day,” commented Rosalie Coughenour, “and it was scrubbed weekly on hands and knees with a scrub brush and soapy water. It was stripped and waxed monthly.”
“Our family often talks about how my mom would scrub the kitchen from stem to stern on Saturday,” recalls Norma Marcolini Ryan of Brownsville. “She would make sure the floor was spic-and-span, and then she would place newspapers all over, so it would be clean for Sunday. Today’s newspapers might bleed onto the floor, but for some reason, those papers did not. Then after supper on Saturday evening or early on Sunday morning, all of the newspapers would be picked up, and clean rugs would be laid down on the floor.”
Floors, curtains, ceilings, walls – 24 hours a day, every surface in the house gradually became coated with a film of soot.
“I remember cleaning wallpaper,” recalls Luzerne Township native Marianne Stuart Schuhle of Chesterfield, Va. “We used a soft green dough to clean it. You took a handful of the dough and wiped the wallpaper with it. We did this at least once every season, and that dough worked great!”
As it turned out, that soft dough had more uses than cleaning wallpaper. In the mid-1950s, a young fellow from Cincinnati named Joe McVicker, while working with his father, became familiar with the non-toxic wallpaper-cleaning dough. One day Joe heard his relative, a nursery school teacher, complain that the modeling clay her students were using was not very pliable.
Joe sent her a sample of the wallpaper-cleaning dough. The nursery school kids loved working with it, and soon all Cincinnati elementary schools were using it as modeling clay. By 1956, McVicker’s dough was being marketed in single 11/2-pound cans for children’s use. The following year, a three-can pack of red, blue and yellow dough hit the store shelves. Play-Doh has been a hit with kids ever since.
Despite living in a smoky haze that often drifted over the patch from the smoldering coke ovens, and even though the air quality inside the house was also suspect due to the coal-fired stove, grates, or coal furnace, children and adults accepted these conditions as normal.
“My mother washed the curtains every month,” Marianne Schuhle commented, “because coal dust was the bane of every woman who was trying to keep a clean home. When I get together with my friends and classmates now, we laugh about how we used to have to clean our noses of the coal dust every morning when we got to school. In the 1940s, girls at Brownsville High School wore white blouses, and our sleeves would be blackened by the time we reached our third or fourth period class. It was not unexpected though. We just dealt with it.”
The coal-fired stove, the ice box, and the sink were all vital fixtures in the kitchens of yesteryear. However, we must not forget to mention the central feature in most of those kitchens – the multi-purpose kitchen table. In addition to hosting many meals, it was often a center of activity throughout the day.
“I have my grandmother’s beautiful table that seated 12,” Rosalie Coughenour noted. “Sunday dinner would find a passel of relatives visiting us, and after dinner, the table was usually a place for fun. Sometimes the table would be used as an oval racetrack by my grandfather, who would chase visiting children around it with his false teeth partially out of his mouth. The children would run and squeal with delight.
“Very young children were rewarded with playing in the sugar bucket. A clean sheet was placed on the floor with the bucket in the center. They would use the scoop or a funnel to put the sugar into a pie pan and then back into the bucket. A good time was had by all in Grandma’s kitchen. It was the happiest place in the world!”
Now the kitchen, once the center of family meals and activities, has often become a transitory stop around dinnertime. Instead of gathering around the kitchen table for the evening meal, family members pop in to pay individual visits to the refrigerator/freezer, move over to the microwave, then disappear into the living room with a can of soda and an irradiated meal. Dishes and implements that aren’t disposable are deposited into the dishwasher for later automatic cleansing. In many households, the kitchen, once so alive with happy chatter and conversation during meal preparation and after-dinner cleanup, has become a very quiet place.
Alma Mulligan sums up her feelings about the evolution of the labor-intensive “kitchen of yesteryear” into the efficient technology center it has become today.
“I think something was lost with modernity,” Alma laments, “such as the cooperation, sharing, and conversations that took place in the old-fashioned kitchen.”
Imagine if we could question housewives from that bygone era, women who spent most of their day cooking, baking, canning and cleaning up in those simpler kitchens of yesteryear. What if we could ask them the following question: If you would have had a magic wand back then, would you have exchanged your old-fashioned kitchen, simple but busy with family meals and daily activities, for the technologically advanced, convenient, but much quieter kitchen of today?
Do you think any of them would say no?
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Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201 or 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, PA 15442. Comments about these weekly articles may be sent to Editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 E. Church St., Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com . All past articles are on the Web at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn/